Atmospheric Marketing … with a Side of Bacon

Here’s the question: how do you engage and pique the curiosity of 400+ digital marketers and technologists? Especially when this group has been around the block a few times, and has seen trends and best practices from all corners of the industry. If you’re among a handful of crafty people at Tealium, you turn the tables.

The goal at our recent Digital Velocity conference, held April 14-16 at the Hard Rock Hotel San Diego, was to leverage our technology in brand new ways. Our customers already know the power of our Tealium AudienceStream™ real-time enterprise data platform, but not everyone had thought about how AudienceStream and other solutions from Tealium can engage people in the physical realm.

Customers regularly use Tealium to track how their visitors interact with their digital properties – what they look at, what they click on, what their behaviors are, etc. For Digital Velocity, a few of us in engineering wanted to do the same, but with physical behaviors. What did our attendees do while at the conference, how long did they linger in certain areas, what were the differences in behavior based on attendee profile? To accomplish this, we leveraged all three of our products – AudienceStream, the Tealium iQ™ tag management system, and the Tealium DataAccess™ solution – along with a handful of partner technologies, such as Facebook’s Parse and Splunk.

We started our project by importing our event registration data, as well as the attendee’s CRM profile from our Salesforce account, into AudienceStream. Then we layered in questions prompted via email — such as which rock band they would most like to see reunite – along with data on who downloaded our iOS and Android conference apps. Then we got creative. We placed iBeacons throughout the conference venue and networking parties to track people’s movement.

Deploying iBeacons at Digital Velocity

With these beacons strategically placed and our mobile app downloaded on everyone’s phones, we could see how long attendees stayed on the dance floor. We could see how popular our food options were. Turns out candied bacon and frosted donuts won handily — no major data crunching needed there after all.

While we got a lot of great data, we wanted to engage our attendees as they walked around. We set up audiences and triggers in AudienceStream based on how long users lingered in various locations. If someone visited the coffee stand several times, we’d send a push notification rewarding them with a Starbucks gift card. For those that indulged in the candied bacon sticks, we would hand deliver a “bacon lovers bag” filled with wacky bacon gifts.

Others, including myself, were warmly greeted in the morning after our big 80s dance party the night before with a “recovery kit” based on the amount of time we spent at the bar and on the dance floor.

Party animals got a push notification via Parse.

Through all of this fun, we wanted to foster a dialogue with our attendees around the idea that data lives all around our customers. The days of tracking web behaviors alone can’t adequately explain what customers are doing. They are switching devices at an increasing rate. They are visiting stores while researching products on their phones. They are bypassing traditional support channels in lieu of Twitter. No matter which channel they choose, they expect brands to treat with the same level of care and knowledge. And they expect brands to operate in real time, all the time.

Fun segments created in AudienceStream, and then applied to attendees who met the criteria.

But one of the biggest concerns we hear from marketers is that they don’t know where to start in this new world of connected experiences and omnichannel marketing. How do I know which customer segments to create? What if I’m wrong? Our answer was to think about how people interact — start with a small test, listen to data, and adapt. We had no idea how much time constituted a bacon stick “lover” versus someone who just grabbed one. What about people who were casually walking by? We leveraged our Splunk integration so that we could watch the data in real time. As attendees moved around, data streamed into Splunk in under a second giving us a real-time view that could help inform how we used actions, like push notifications.

This is just one example of something we call “atmospheric marketing,” which is a form of ubiquitous omni-present marketing. We’ll be sharing more ways that our customers and employees are leveraging Tealium and our partners’ solutions in innovative ways. In other words, Digital Velocity Europe attendees, get ready!